Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America by Michel Gobat (review)

In this impressive study of US filibusters in the 1850s, Michel Gobat argues that William Walker's efforts to colonize Nicaragua originated as liberal imperialism, not proslavery expansionism. As such, it provides a pivotal case study linking the ideological and material projects of antebellum Manifest Destiny and postbellum US interventions overseas (the liberal imperialism that intended to uplift the downtrodden without making them equals or citizens). While for decades historians have differentiated "continental expansion" from "overseas imperialism" (often to defend the former as more democratic or virtuous), Gobat's story shows how much those impulses shared. Greed for Nicaragua's resources and valuable transit route was accompanied by promises to modernize and improve the country. For non-Americans, US expansion was a promise as well as a threat, and therefore some liberal Nicaraguans welcomed William Walker's revolution.

Previous accounts of filibustering campaigns have focused on the apparent proslavery turn that Walker's regime took after it fell from power in Nicaragua and have overlooked the complex aspirations that motivated this regime, which included spreading democracy, technological progress, and entrepreneurialism. Gobat goes back to the beginning, and not just in the United States but also in Central America, unearthing in newspapers, letters, and government documents (in multiple languages) the myriad social and cultural milieu whence emerged the people who would fund and fight for American colonization in Nicaragua. This enables him to tell the local story unfolding in Nicaragua, as well as the better known (but incomplete) story of Walker's US supporters. Today Walker's revolution is better remembered in Nicaragua than in the United States, and the contemporary references that Gobat includes are both telling and fascinating.

Diverse constituencies imagined "Americanization" as an improved future for Central America. Alongside the martial mercenaries of Manifest Destiny, Gobat finds many others among the twelve thousand Americans and Europeans who relocated to Nicaragua. There were settler families; teetotaling, antislavery, evangelical moral reformers; and European forty-eighters advocating for democracy. (However, Gobat cautions that the line between the mercenary soldier and the land-hungry settler was very thin in Walker's Nicaragua.) These newcomers joined forces with a group of Central American elites, revolutionaries, and clergy hoping for progressive economic, political, and social change. Walker enjoyed support from local conservative elites as well as from liberal revolutionaries. Each of these groups hoped to profit from the ambitious plans Walker touted: major transportation improvements that would make Nicaragua a trade hub; thousands of enterprising US settlers who would modernize the economy; and reforms in education, public health, temperance and anti-vagrancy laws (the latter being the slippery slope back into support of slavery). Ultimately, Gobat concludes, their efforts failed for two main reasons. First, Americanization was a vague, flexible term that meant very different things to different people, making it difficult to actualize to everyone's satisfaction. Second, the existing class divisions within Nicaraguan society proved impossible for the regime to overcome. As Walker confronted these challenges in 1857, his promising revolution gave way to a brutal dictatorship. His forces razed Granada in a weeklong drunken spree of violence and rapine.

Although US historians interested in the causes of the Civil War often look to the increasing polarization of domestic politics and culture in the 1850s, Gobat's book tells a surprising and engaging story about how free soil, abolition, and proslavery sentiments followed US settlers beyond North America, where they mixed with the class politics of native Nicaraguans and the ideals of European immigrants. Readers of Civil War History will also be interested in this book because it reveals that not all filibusters were proslavery Southerners hoping to annex a new slave state. Some were, but the majority of Walker's supporters were advocates who believed in sharing the "blessings" of democracy and capitalism with the rest of the Americas, particularly those they believed were under the...